It was my sister’s house. I recognized it once I looked at the photographs again — the same porch, the same back door, even the old maple tree that used to sit beside the driveway. My sister died in 2004, and that house had been sold the following year. I asked myself why my husband would have been taking pictures of it from across the street. Then I noticed the dates. The first photographs were from 1994, and there were pictures almost every few months until 2003. I called the woman who bought the house and asked whether she’d ever known my husband. She said no, but then she told me something strange: the previous owner had once complained about a man sitting in a car across the street with a camera.
I went back through the envelope and found one photograph I’d missed. It showed my sister standing in the backyard with a little girl I’d never seen before. On the back, my husband’s handwriting said, “She doesn’t know yet.” I called my sister’s old friend because she was the only person I could think of who might remember. She went quiet when I described the photograph. Then she said my sister had told her once that she was afraid my husband would find out about something she’d done before she died. I asked what she’d done. She said she didn’t know, but she’d remembered one detail: my sister used to receive a letter every month from a woman in another town.
I found the letters that night in an old box of my sister’s things that I’d never opened. Most were gone, but one envelope remained, dated 2003. Inside was a photograph of the same little girl, older now, standing beside my sister. And written underneath was my husband’s name. I called the number on the back of the photograph. An older woman answered and immediately asked who had given me her number. I told her I’d found my husband’s photographs. There was a long silence. Then she said, “If he left you the safe, he finally decided you were ready to know why he was watching that house.”
